In our competitive age, organizations have a great need to communicate with their customers or potential customers, whether it be for marketing and brand awareness purposes, sales support or customer service.
A significant improvement in the communications area is the emergence of real-time messaging communication systems with presence information, such as the popular instant messaging (“IM”) services: AOL® Instant Messenger™ (“AIM”), Yahoo® Messenger, MSN® Messenger. These real-time messaging channels provide organizations the unmatched ability to reach the individual (not just the household), in a time- and event-sensitive way, when both parties want to be reached.
Presence is defined as the willingness and ability of a user to communicate with others on a network. A presence aware data network is a data network with the protocol support in the network to detect when a user is able and willing to communicate with others at that point in time. This “presence” information is then communicated through the data network to other pasties that have indicated that they wish to know when the user is “present”. This is most often implemented by a system of buddy lists. As a user of a presence aware data network, you enter the handle identifying the users you wish to communicate with on a regular basis and be informed of their presence status in a buddy list. The handle, also called screen name, is used to uniquely identify users and application on the presence aware data network. The communication client used by the user will then display the online/offline status of users in his buddy list. In most presence aware network more than just online/offline information is reported. For example some networks give you different feedback if the user is online using a direct land based link or through a mobile wireless link. Most networks also are able to report on the device activity or inactivity. A user may be logged into the network but not actually in front of the communication client used to connect to the network. Some clients also allow users to set different presence state-like “I'm away from my desk for a few minutes”. Hence a presence aware network communicates between parties each party ability and willingness to communicate.
Presence aware data/messaging networks are very attractive to users because users are only interrupted by others when they are willing to receive a communication. The presence information is reporting to others your willingness to communicate. If a user does not want to communicate he can either log off the network or set a state that indicates this unwillingness to be disturbed. Hence such systems are less intrusive for both parties than, for example, a telephone call. As the receiver of the telephone call you can get interrupted at any time. As a caller you don't know if the called person is willing to receive the call at this point in time, or if you will interrupt the called person, or instead be dropped into a voice-mail system. Alternatives to real-time communication systems, like instant messaging or the telephone network, are message based systems, like e-mail. But these are less natural for quick two-way communication even if they do allow the recipient to control the timing of the communication.
The types of communications organizations want to perform are varied. Organizations may want to promote offer and sale opportunities. They may want to offer items in short supply to their loyal customers (for example hot concert ticket sales.) They may simply want to build brand awareness of their products and services. They may want to provide information on their products and services. They may want to deliver timely information to the their customers. In our modern economy many of these communications are time critical. Tickets get sold quickly; promotions have precise start and end dates. Presence aware data networks are an ideal channel to bring together organizations and users when both want to communicate and where time is a key component.
Organizations may also want to engage into a dialog with users based on the user location. Being able to achieve this can provide many benefits to an organization. But this has to be done in a user acceptable manner. There is a fine line between wanting to let a user know you want to attract his attention and having the user feel harassed or stalked. Leveraging presence and location aware networks is one way to achieve such balance. Instead of pushing offers to a user when she is in proximity of a store, the store could simply register its presence on her mobile device, and she can decide weather and with whom to interact.
Users increasingly receive solicitation for their attention from organizations through the various direct marketing channels, but many now feel overwhelmed, and in particular resent un-solicited messages from organizations through computer based channels such as e-mail. Users want to regain control and decide with whom and when they engage in a dialog with an organization. Hence, it is important that organizations wanting to interact with their users be perceived as un-obtrusive.
Users can be very receptive to using such real-time messaging systems to dialog with an organization. Real-time messaging can be used for pull programs where the user initiates a dialog on his own or for push programs where the organization initiates a dialog with a pre-registered user. Presence offers a hybrid mode where the organization signals it is ready and wants to engage in a dialog using the messaging system presence functionality. When a user sees the organization is ready to engage in a dialog through its presence indicator, she can decide if she wants to engage in a dialog, and when. Similarly, if the user opted-in to receive notifications from the organization, the organization can use the user presence information to engage in a dialog when the user is available.
Recently, some IM systems have offered some organizations the ability to use their network for communication purposes or have been used to connect users to automated systems. These are called “Bots” and allow IM users to interact with organization's computerized systems. But to date, all these operate in a passive mode where the bot is always on-line, and the user simply interacts when ready. They do not use presence to indicate to individual users, when they have new information for them, or to contact them if need be pro-actively.
Thus, an object of the present invention is to enable users and organizations in a variety of settings/for a variety of applications to engage in dialog when both are ready to do so by leveraging the presence mechanism present in presence aware networks. Numerous applications of the invention exist and include, for example, customer support applications, which enables an organization to notify a customer that it has a billing issue with him, or a car dealership that a customer car is ready for pickup.
Another application/use of the invention is to help IM service providers monetize non-paying users of their system. Most public IM systems are freely available to users. It is natural for such IM service operators to look for ways to generate revenue from these non-paying users. Some IM service operators have responded by reserving some real-estate on their IM clients for brand sponsoring. This is effective—but can be defeated if users use third party clients to connect to the IM network, and simple banner ads may not be very effective. With this invention, the IM operator could add service handles directly to the users buddy list without the user initiating this. Part of a user buddy list would be brands that paid the IM service operator to be placed in non-paying users buddy list. This is similar to free web sites that charge advertisers for banner adds displayed on the web site. If an IM service operator took such an approach, it is clear there would be more advertisers interested that could reasonable fit in a users buddy list. Hence this invention also includes the ability for the IM operator to subset the list of brands that appears on the buddy list, or subset the list of brands that the user sees as available using a system to perform this. The functionality of that system would be similar to what is used today in advertisement servers that place an ad among many available ads on a web page, and that choice is based on a multitude of factor such as what advertisers paid to be placed and prior user behavior; for example placing service handle of advertisers selling computer equipment if it is known the user had responded to prior computer equipment offers. Where presence fits it this application of IM technology is organizations could use the network presence to indicate to the IM service operator that they have something to offer, which would make the organization eligible for being presented to users.